Why it’s alright to be an elite bastard 1 Jun 2008 John Pieret’s blog Thoughts in a Haystack has an essay on this that is well worth reading, although I’d rather be called an elite snob than an elite bastard because all Australians are bastards. It’s part of the Carnival of the Elite Bastards #1 at En Tequila es Verdad. General Science Social evolution
Evolution An interesting paper on cultural evolution 31 Dec 2009 PNAS has a very interesting paper about cultural evolution in Taiwan at the beginning of the 20th Century, by Melissa Brown and Marcus Feldman. It basically argues that two different selective forces, Cultural and Social, influenced the decline in footbinding – it became seen as a low status practice, which… Read More
Social evolution Truisms 5 18 Jan 200918 Sep 2017 Truism 5: One is only required (by our language games) to justify moral claims one or two levels Scholium*: Justifying moral claims is a language game in Wittgenstein’s sense, but only in a philosophical language game do we justify the justifications. That is why many people prefer to make God… Read More
Accommodationism How to argue with silly thing believers 30 Jan 201420 Feb 2014 [Apologies this took a while; I’ve been rather sick] So, given all this [Why believers believe silly things, why they believe the particular silly things they do, and the developmental hypothesis of belief acquisition], how can you change a believer’s mind? It is tempting to say that you cannot, or… Read More
Nobody would ever mistake me for a Pommy Bastard. Well, there was that one time when Cliff Richard’s manager thought I came from South London, but that was a while ago and I’ve Aussied up since…
John, Pharyngulas new star Etha Williams has a fantastic post on The Consolation of Elitism which is well worth pointing to : http://jeanneshade.blogspot.com/2008/05/consolation-of-elitism.html Cheers, Martin
John – your attempt to link to the carnival up there goes to John Pieret’s blog. The Bastard Carnival is here Note that Etha’s post that Martin linked to is part of the same Carnival John W. meant to link to.